Rousseau, the Age of Enlightenment, and Their Legacies

Rousseau, the Age of Enlightenment, and Their Legacies
Author: Robert Wokler
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691147892

Robert Wokler was one of the world's leading experts on Rousseau and the Enlightenment, but some of his best work was published in the form of widely scattered and difficult-to-find essays. This book collects for the first time a representative selection of his most important essays on Rousseau and the legacy of Enlightenment political thought. These essays concern many of the great themes of the age, including liberty, equality and the origins of revolution. But they also address a number of less prominent debates, including those over cosmopolitanism, the nature and social role of music and the origins of the human sciences in the Enlightenment controversy over the relationship between humans and the great apes. These essays also explore Rousseau's relationships to Rameau, Pufendorf, Voltaire and Marx; reflect on the work of important earlier scholars of the Enlightenment, including Ernst Cassirer and Isaiah Berlin; and examine the influence of the Enlightenment on the twentieth century. One of the central themes of the book is a defense of the Enlightenment against the common charge that it bears responsibility for the Terror of the French Revolution, the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth-century and the Holocaust.

Inquisition and Medieval Society

Inquisition and Medieval Society
Author: James B. Given
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2018-08-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501724959

James B. Given analyzes the inquisition in one French region in order to develop a sociology of medieval politics. Established in the early thirteenth century to combat widespread popular heresy, inquisitorial tribunals identified, prosecuted, and punished heretics and their supporters. The inquisition in Languedoc was the best documented of these tribunals because the inquisitors aggressively used the developing techniques of writing and record keeping to build cases and extract confessions.Using a Marxist and Foucauldian approach, Given focuses on three inquiries: what techniques of investigation, interrogation, and punishment the inquisitors worked out in the course of their struggle against heresy; how the people of Languedoc responded to the activities of the inquisitors; and what aspects of social organization in Languedoc either facilitated or constrained the work of the inquisitors. Punishments not only inflicted suffering and humiliation on those condemned, he argues, but also served as theatrical instruction for the rest of society about the terrible price of transgression. Through a careful pursuit of these inquires, Given elucidates medieval society's contribution to the modern apparatus of power.

The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity

The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity
Author: J. Heilbron
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2013-12-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9401155283

This volume offers one of the first systematic analyses of the rise of modern social science. Contrary to the standard accounts of various social science disciplines, the essays in this volume demonstrate that modern social science actually emerged during the critical period between 1750 and 1850. It is shown that the social sciences were a crucial element in the conceptual and epistemic revolution, which parallelled and partly underpinned the political and economic transformations of the modern world. From a consistently comparative perspective, a group of internationally leading scholars takes up fundamental issues such as the role of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution in the shaping of the social sciences, the changing relationships between political theory and moral discourse, the profound transformation of philosophy, and the constitution of political economy and statistics.

Vie et mort du couple en Nouvelle-France

Vie et mort du couple en Nouvelle-France
Author: Josette Brun
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2006-11-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0773577084

La Nouvelle-France offre-t-elle aux femmes un champ d'action élargi, comme le voudrait une certaine conception de l'histoire coloniale? Ce n'est pas ce que révèle l'analyse du partage des droits et des responsabilités entre époux, des secondes noces et des stratégies de survie économique des personnes veuves. « Maîtres et seigneurs » chez eux, selon le vœu de l'État, de l'Église et de la loi, les maris assument formellement l'essentiel des responsabilités professionnelles et patrimoniales du ménage. Lorsqu'ils meurent, leurs veuves doivent pour survivre apprendre à profiter de leur nouvelle capacité juridique, d'une certaine flexibilité des rôles féminins, de leur expérience professionnelle ou de leur douaire, qu'elles mettent en valeur seules ou avec l'aide de la parenté. Les veufs, souvent parents de jeunes orphelins et contraints par les normes de la masculinité, se remarient rapidement. Ils retiennent moins l'attention des autorités que les veuves, nombreuses, dom la figure tantôt attendrissante et tantôt suspecte se trouve parfois directement mêlée aux rapports de pouvoir entre la métropole et ses colonies nord-américaines.

The Art of Midwifery

The Art of Midwifery
Author: Hilary Marland
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2005-09-26
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 1134818130

Drawing on a vast range of archival material from six countries, the contributors show the diversity in midwives' practices, competence, socio-economic background and education, as well as their public function and image.

Redefining Female Religious Life

Redefining Female Religious Life
Author: Laurence Lux-Sterritt
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2019-06-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351906046

This short study offers a contribution to the flourishing debate on post-Reformation female piety. In an effort to avoid excessive polarization condemning conventual life as restrictive or hailing it as a privileged path towards spiritual perfection, it analyses the reasons which led early-modern women to found new congregations with active vocations. Were these novel communities born out of their founders' rejection of the conventual model? Through the comparative analysis of two congregations which became, in seventeenth-century France and England, the embodiment of women's efforts to become actively involved in the Catholic Reformation, this book offers a nuanced interpretation of female religious life and particularly of the relationship between cloistered tradition and aposotolic vocations. Despite the differences in their national political and religious backgrounds, both the French Ursulines and the Institute of English Ladies shared the same aim to revitalise the links between the Catholic faith and the people, reaching out of the cloister and into the world by educating girls who would later become wives and mothers. This study suggests that these pioneering Catholic women, though in breach of Tridentine decrees, did not turn their backs on contemplative piety: although both the French Ursulines and the English Ladies undertook work which had hitherto been the preserve religious men, they were motivated by their desire to help the Church rather than by a wish to liberate women from what eighteenth-century writers later perceived as the shackles of conventual obedience. It is argued that the founders of new, uncloistered congregations were embracing vocations which they construed as personals sacrifices; they followed the arduous path 'mixed life' in an act of self-abnegation and chose apostolic work as their early-modern reinterpretation of medieval asceticism.

The Power of Women

The Power of Women
Author: Susan L. Smith
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2016-11-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1512809403

Eve tempting Adam with the apple, Delilah shearing Samson's hair, Phyllis riding the philosopher Aristotle like a horse—from the patristic period through the sixteenth century, examples of disorderly women such as these from the Bible, antiquity, and romance were cited to prove beyond any doubt that women exercise a power that no man, however superior his moral and physical qualities, can resist. An example of Latin topica, loci, or loci communes central to ancient rhetoric and medieval literature, the Power of Women topos illustrated how a woman could dominate, humiliate, and even destroy the man who loved her too well. Two or more infamous female figures were brought together to exemplify a cluster of interrelated themes: the wiles of women, the power of love, and the trials of marriage. Susan L. Smith's comprehensive study of the Power of Women topos in written texts and in art emphasizes the critical phase of its development from the late twelfth to the end of the fourteenth century. During this period , she argues, traditional employment of the topos exclusively to condemn women and justify male authority underwent a dramatic shift as new voices (some of them female voices) appropriated the Power of Women to contest and relativize the misogynistic views it had been created to promote. The Power of Women analyzes the topos's shifting operations in the context of ancient and medieval theories of rhetoric, particularly with respect to the practice of exemplification, which presuppose the possibility of conflicting judgments on disputed topics. Smith further supports her argument by reference to a wide range of recent theoretical writings by Mikhail Bakhtin and others.

The Extreme Right in Interwar France

The Extreme Right in Interwar France
Author: Samuel Kalman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2016-12-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351889907

Historians of the French extreme right frequently denote the existence of a strong xenophobic and nationalist tradition dating from the 1880s, a perpetual anti-republicanism which pervaded twentieth-century political discourse. Much attention is habitually paid to the interwar era, deemed the zenith of this success, when the leagues attracted hundreds of thousands of members and enjoyed significant political acclaim. Most works on the subject speak of 'the French right' or 'French fascism', presenting compendia of figures and organizations, from the Dreyfus Affair in the 1890s through the notorious Vichy regime, the authoritarian construct which emerged following the defeat to Nazi Germany in June 1940. However, historians rarely discuss the programmatic elements of extreme right-wing doctrine, which demanded the eradication of parliamentary democracy and the transformation of the nation and state according to group principles. Instead, most detail the organization and membership of various organizations, and often recount their quotidian activities as political actors within (and in opposition to) the Third Republic. This book offers a new interpretation of the extreme right in interwar French politics, focusing upon the largest and most influential such groups in 1920s and 1930s, the Faisceau and the Croix de Feu. It explores their designs for extensive political, economic, and social renewal, a project that commanded significant attention from the leadership and rank-and-file of both organizations, providing the overarching goal behind their aspiration to power. The book examines five components of these efforts: A renewal of politics and government, the establishment of a new economic order, a revaluation of gender and familial relations, the role of youth in the new socio-political construct, and the politics of exclusion inherent in every facet of Faisceau and CDF doctrine. In so doing it contributes to a historical understanding of the programmatic elements of the interwar extreme-right, while simultaneously situating its most prominent exponents within their broader historical context.